Hi folks,

Last week, I introduced the three practitioners leading our August cohorts. Here is the other half of what you get: the people in the cohort with you.

Every cohort is built around a small, confidential group of senior engineers and architects from different companies. You bring a decision you are working on, and you get the read of people who do the same job somewhere else and have no stake in your internal politics. That perspective is hard to find inside one organization.

Two things graduates tell us most often. The first is how quickly the sessions turn into something they can use. Chinmay Sawaji, a senior software engineer at Klaviyo, put it this way: “I can now articulate trade-offs in a way that improves my proposals at work.” One participant described walking into a session still defending an architecture choice as an opinion, and leaving able to argue it on outcomes, using fitness functions and DORA metrics.

The second is the value of the time and the group itself. David Holliday, a product owner at Munich Re, said the cohort “gave me structured time each week to step back and think about what it really means to be an architect.”

Participants also tell us the mix does more than they expected. People arrive assuming their company's problems are unique, and find that engineers from very different companies are working through the same things, often landing on the same solutions.

That group tends to outlast the five weeks. You also co-author a capstone article, and the strongest are published on InfoQ under your name.

Three cohorts start this month: Architecture on August 13, Engineering Leadership on August 21, and AI Security & Privacy on August 26. Each is five weeks, four hours a week, live. Everything else is on the cohort website.

Find your cohort.